First, the fact that WoW Classic won’t be out until Summer 2019 is a joke, even by Blizzard ‘soon’ slow ass development standards, but we aren’t here to talk about that.

What we are going to talk about is the fact that Classic access will be available to all WoW subscribers. You know why they did that? Because people, of which there are many, have said Classic will have more players than current WoW, so to save themselves the embarrassment of admitting that the game they had in 2005 was better than the version they have ‘enhanced and updated’ all the way into 2019, they rolled the two into one offering. Shameful in how cowardly that is!

PS: Would there be a single EVE player playing EVE Classic over the current game? I think not.

10 Responses to Friday Conspiracy Theory – WoW Classic edition

Actually it’s smart of them to do that, because now it is a part of the total MAU numbers for the franchise. If they pull in a million players that have been playing on private servers for years the numbers will surely jump.

I was looking at the Classic WoW talent calculator that wowhead put up and realized that I’m just going to end up playing another druid (my main since a few months into vanilla has been a druid). I miss my old druid before the endless nerfs and adjustments and class redesigns.

I had no doubt that they would let you play both under the same subscription. They haven’t had to go free to play so they don’t have to use a classic/progression/special server to pressure people to subscribe. I am sure they are happy to just keep people paying.

As for the timing, that would seem to be about the point where expansions usually start to lose subscribers hard. They roped some people in with their six month subscription deal, because the true believers will do that for a mount. They have them until late spring, then there will be WoW Classic to keep them going.

Man I really thought it would be it’s own sub, probably smart in the end though since the current expansion will be in full fatigue by then so good way to keep numbers up.

Also there is no way classic wow would have more subs than current wow, maybe for the initial launch but it would plummet fast. Yes there is a group of people that classic will be great for but many players of current wow would quickly tire of it because of how much harder/grindy whatever you want to call it versus today.

Current WoW has like 3m subs or so I believe. Vanilla will easily have far more initially, and then it will just be a question of retention and for how long, but at a minimum I’d say 3-4 months for that to kick in for many.

It literally never even occurred to me that Blizzard would ask for a separate sub for Classic. All the other companies who have run Classic or Progression servers have had a mixed economy of F2P and Sub/Premium that makes it very easy for them to use special ruleset servers as a way to drive business for the pay-to-play end of their operations. Blizzard only has pay-to-play on the table so making people pay separately for Classic would make no sense whatsoever. It would be a penalty for existing subscribers and cause huge PR issues for no real benefit. Even if they’d allowed exsiting subscribers a discount on a WoW Classic sub it would have been received very badly.

Counter to that, by selling the incoming “Classic” players that aren’t already WoW subbers a generic “All the WoW you can stand” sub they open the very real possibility of tempting some of those players back to the regular Live game when they tire of Classic because they will very likely have money left in their sub. And some of those will stick for a while at least.

Seems like both the obvious and the smart way to handle it to me. Also Summer 2019 is about 6-12 months sooner than I thought we’d see it.

It’s basic hedging, really. I think we can agree on one thing: there will not be much concurrent overlap between live and Classic players, hence very few hypothetical double subs lost. So there is no downside to this move, and plenty of already-discussed upsides.

The only major overlap I could see is progression raiding guilds still keeping up progress, and then playing Vanilla when not raiding.

But, the big overlap wouldn’t be in players, it would be in subscriptions. Anyone who has a 6 month+ sub would likely run two subs for Vanilla, and then likely drop current WoW if they are enjoying Vanilla more. Blizzard doesn’t want to see that happen (seeing Vanilla subs become greater than current), so they rolled it all into one.